And yet there's something gloomily philistine about it, something that leaves you with a surprising pang for the days when Tory patricians were allowed to be decent chaps without quite such demands on their electoral palatability.
Even if such tales are apocryphal no one in the party is looking forward to going on the stump and selling the message this time around, he adds gloomily.
There is indeed some residual nastiness among the Tories, and not only in the rank and file: Mr Cameron's notion of the "broken society" is gloomily reactionary.
Mr Sannikov says gloomily that "neither Moscow nor Brussels has any plan of action".
ReprintsThis week Juan José Ibarretxe, the PNV man who heads the Basques' regional assembly, again called on Mr Aznar to hold talks with all Basque nationalists, while gloomily warning that "we may arrive too late, as communication has been made impossible, and Spain and Euskadi [the Basque region] may be unable to live together".
The racial breakdown of these numbers is gloomily predictable.
They also say, gloomily, that Iran is meddling more than before, egging on the government's two main Shia parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa ("Call") party, to let their militias off the leash.
("Who cares about Georgia?" asks Mr Rondeli, gloomily).Mr Saakashvili and Mr Yushchenko are looking for a concrete foreign-policy achievement.
Non-economic measures of social well-being get little recognition, and it is gloomily assumed that one nation's success is inevitably another nation's failure.
As Mr Muasher has noted gloomily elsewhere, Mr Netanyahu is likely to be Israel's prime minister again, some time next year.The author produces numerous anecdotes to suggest that the Israelis were uninterested in the sort of deal that would have minimally satisfied the Palestinians or the Arabs at large.
CRIMINAL courts, Sir Robin Auld considers gloomily, are only a last and limited resort for addressing society's woes—"a blunt instrument of social repair".
